Category Archives: Integrations

Beyond troubleshooting and support, Zingtree makes a handy interactive front-end for getting people to the right page on your website. We consistently see our customers building trees for sales prospecting, medical appointments, loan qualification, hiring and other environments where a little bit of automated filtering goes a long way. Plus, Zingtrees are a great means for information gathering, too!

We also get requests for integrating Zingtree within various back-end platforms – most notably, CRM. Often, when a customer’s data gets imported into another system, you’ll want the Q&A transcript of their Zingtree session attached.

We’ve created a Simple Sales Funnel demo tree and a basic back-end script in the Zingtree Gallery so you can see a working example.

Under the hood: When the form is loaded, the add-session-data-to-form.js script reads the session_id parameter, then loads the session transcript into the hidden field with the id=”session_data”.

BONUS:

Rather than having a field that must have an id of “session_data”, you can also specify the ID of the field that you want to insert Zingtree data into. This is especially helpful for Salesforce or other CRM apps that generate forms for you.

For example, if you added a multi-line text field to your CRM system form with an ID of “my_data_field”, you could use this piece of code instead:

Travis A., who is implementing Zingtree for a video technology company, was keen on using Zingtree to try to reduce his team’s support ticket load. He also needed to import a synopsis of the Zingtree session data into his Zendesk tickets so his tech support people could get some time-saving background information.

Travis wanted to emphasize the condensed Q&A part of the session. Done!

Here’s the new look of the Zendesk Decision Tree Support app:

Here’s what’s new in the Zendesk Support App, version 4:

The Q&A view is now the default.

Any “back” or “restart” button clicks no longer show in Q&A view.

The answers clicked are highlighted, so it’s easy for a support person to see where the customer went at a glance.

There’s no getting around it – we love WordPress! As a powerful piece of software that enables people around the world to spread and share ideas, build amazing websites and more, we understand the need to be as integrative with this ever-popular tool.

Zingtree’s robust toolkit allows WordPress users to directly embed interactive decision trees into any web page needed, making it easy for customers and end-users to navigate through any process on your site in a simple question-and-answer flow.

Many of our amazing customers are already taking advantage of this plugin, by hosting powerful, customized decision trees directly on their respective websites! See if you could survive in the wild with this interactive journey built by Live Out There, then check out a robust and helpful troubleshooter decision tree from Screen Time.

Here’s how to get started with your own WordPress-hosted decision tree:

Some of our customers have asked for an extra level of security for their trees, such that only people authenticated via a corporate intranet can access it. This article shows how it’s done, for ANY login system on ANY intranet.

Universally restricting access is accomplished by having an internal server access the tree via a server-side include, rather than via a user’s browser via embedded code in the page. This means that all accesses of the tree come from a single corporate IP address or range. Zingtree has an IP filtering option for any tree, so it’s easy to restrict access and use whatever authentication processes are already in place on the corporate intranet.

The method described here can work with organizations using SSO (Single Sign On), or any other login system.

Create a web page for the tree to display on your internal server. This page will include the necessary JS and CSS files to show the tree. Load your tree using a server-side call, instead of embedding it into an iFrame or linking to a URL hosted at Zingtree.com.

Examples

Technical Details

The example above is written using PHP, but any server-side scripting language can be used. Our demo is a template around which a URL for a tree can be loaded. This template contains all the CSS and JS files needed to display a functioning Zingtree decision tree.

Zingtree is built on top of Bootstrap 3, so the basic Bootstrap files are loaded. There are a few custom controls as well included in the template.

Self-service is a win-win for rapidly-growing (and exceedingly busy) businesses, pleasing the majority of customers while at the same time providing an efficient, always-available support medium for customer service teams. Empowering customers to solve problems and answer their own questions means less work for support teams, and overall more satisfied consumers!

72% of people think that self-service support is a fast and easy way to handle support issues

40% of customers place a call after already looking for support or answers themselves

91% of customers would regularly utilize an online, self-service support center if it was tailored to their needs

Your business doesn’t have to get swept up by the new wave of customer service; get your support team up-and-running with self-service support options with these 3 steps.

1. Bulk Up Your Knowledge Base & FAQ

It all starts with your FAQ and knowledge base of information — 56% of customers cite a lack of information as their reason for abandoning a website, so it’s critical to make sure that the content in your support center is totally user-relevant, helpful and currently up-to-date. Revisit and revamp knowledge base articles, FAQ answers and other support-related content on your site on a regular basis (quarterly or even monthly), to provide your customers with the most important, accessible information possible; both your customers and your team members will certainly thank you for your proactive customer care!

2. Implement Interactive Troubleshooters

It’s pretty amazing that in today’s world, you can easily provide 24/7 access to support without doling out for any extra staff members. Creating and integrating interactive, customer support troubleshooters makes it easy to help your customers even when no one is there for a one-on-one. Additionally, Zingtree decision trees make it possible to quickly gather customer background information in case a support ticket is submitted, so you have all of the key information you need in one place.

Pairing your existing knowledge base with interactive decision trees is the best way to cover every base where support is concerned, and simplifies the process of finding real solutions. In fact, organizations that use these decision tree troubleshooters have spent an average of 20% less on support costs overall.

3. Reach Out, and Be Easy to Reach Out To

When a customer is having a major issue, or really just prefers a good old fashioned human interaction, it’s always a good idea to provide a way to get in contact with a real live person. Make it as simple as possible to reach out to your support staff, sales team, or anyone else who could help out – having this kind of clear pathway laid out on your website can mean the difference between a super happy customer, and one that is completely stressed out by your online presence.

Better yet is the idea of reaching out to your customers before they have the chance to have a problematic situation occur; this makes people feel at ease whenever something does inevitably come up, and sets a positive tone for any future communications.

Zingtree supports Single Sign-on (SSO) as a means of restricting access to trees. Many customers have sensitive corporate processes or procedures encapsulated in their trees, and ensuring these trees are accessible only to certain employees can be invaluable.

Single Sign-on can be enabled with separate login systems for:

Employees/agents/end-users.

Tree Authors.

Single Sign-on is a service provided by many vendors, including Okta, Microsoft (ADFS / Active Directory / Azure), Google (G-Suite), Salesforce and more. These services are known as Identity Providers. A single log-in through an Identity Provider gives a user secure, authenticated access to applications provided by Service Providers like Zingtree.

Once you log in through your Identity Provider, you don’t need to re-enter your login credentials. SSO is a very convenient way to secure access to your applications, while not burdening end-users with extra hurdles.

Zingtree supports any service that is SAML 2.0 compliant, which is a common standard.

Configuring Zingtree for SSO

To start, in the Zingtree top menu, go to Account, Single-Sign-on. You can specify SSO for either Agents (employees or end-users) or Authors.

You’ll see the parameters (specific to your organization) to share with your Identity Provider. Here’s how agent view appears:

If you’re setting up SSO for Authors, click this button:

You can switch back to Agent setup by clicking this:

Configure your Identity Provider with these parameters.

Next, click the blue button to Enter Identity Provider Data into Zingtree. The following screen appears:

Copy the rest of these settings from your Identity Provider.

Click Save Identity Provider Settings when finished.

SSO just needs to be set up once for your organization.

Testing Your SSO Setup

Once you’ve set up your Identity Provider and Zingtree for SSO, you can test from Zingtree as follows:

In Zingtree, go to Account, Single Sign-on. This SSO configuration screen appears:

Click the green Test Author Login or Test Agent Login button at the lower right of the page.

From here. you can test logging into your Identity Provider from Zingtree. If you’re already logged in, the test will just return your email or another identifier from your Identity Provider. If you’re not yet logged in, the Identity Provider’s login screen will appear, and then you will be returned to the Zingtree SSO test page after logging in.

Enabling SSO for Agents/End Users

Once SSO is working properly from your test, you can restrict access to any tree as follows.

Go to My Trees, and select the tree that you want to require SSO login.

Click the Settings tool, and you’ll see something like this:

Check Require Single Sign-on (SSO) Login to Access.

Click Update Settings.

Dedicated Agent Login

Rather than having Agents go through the Zingtree login page, you can send them directly to your SSO login page. Here’s how:

Go to Account, My Agents.

Give your agents the link from this button:

Enabling SSO for Authors

From Account, Single Sign-on, switch to SSO for Authors:

Make sure Enable Authors is ticked:

One More Step: You also need to add authors to your organization via Account, My Authors. They will not be required to use a Zingtree login to gain access, but this also validates them as a person who has access to an organization’s trees.

The rest of the setup for sharing information with your identity provider is identical to Agent Setup.

This article was originally published on April 4, 2017 and has been updated on January 8, 2018 to include enhanced SSO capabilities and improvements.

Update October 2018:See this article for an even better way to integrate Freshdesk and Zingtree.

Freshdesk is one of our most popular integrations, so we’ve made sure it’s easy to import Zingtree session transcripts into a Freshdesk ticket. With the integration in place, support staff can see all of the steps a customer went through in a decision tree before needing to ask for help – it’s a huge time-saver for agents!

When the integration is set up, agents will see a Zingtree transcript with each ticket, like this:

Requirements:

You will need the Estate or Forest plan from Freshdesk to accomplish this integration.

Overview:

You’ll first need Freshdesk Admin privileges to complete the process. This method will create a new field called Zingtree Session Data; it gets hidden from the customer, but it appears for the agent answering the ticket. It includes the entire Q&A transcript of the user’s Zingtree session prior to opening a new ticket in Freshdesk.

Here’s how to set up the Freshdesk side:

In Freshdesk, go to your Admin panel, and select Ticket Fields.

Create a new “Multi Line Text” ticket field named Zingtree Session Data. (This field must be set up as “display to customer” and “customer can edit”, but will be hidden from the end-user once you implement step #7 below. Trust us!) The properties will look like this:

Click Done.

Click Save to add the field.

Next go to Admin, Portals, and click Customize Portal next to the portal that will receive Zingtree data.

Go to Layout and Pages, Portal Pages.

Click New Ticket, then add this code to the new ticket edit area:

<script src="//zingtree.com/api/freshdesk-new-ticket.js"></script>

This is what it looks like (new code outlined in red):

Click Save and Publish.

On the Zingtree side:

You need to make Link Nodes that go to your Freshdesk New Ticket form, and add this to the end of the URL:?session_id=#session#

Example:

If this is the link to your ticket form:http://support.mycompany.com/support/tickets/new

Use this URL within a Zingtree Link Node to go to the ticket form, and have the Zingtree session transcript transferred:

http://support.mycompany.com/support/tickets/new?session_id=#session#

We’ve set up a sample Gallery tree (“Freshdesk Integration example”) for you to examine here. You can copy this tree, and then change the URL link to point to your own Freshdesk domain.

Follow these steps and in 15 minutes or less you’ll have a powerful integration between Freshdesk and your Zingtrees.

Live chat is an incredibly useful way to connect to our customers, both for offering support and for getting insights into new product ideas we may never have thought of ourselves. We are happily using Intercom, which allows us to track chat and email conversations with each customer.

For technical inquiries, we use Zingtree Data Entry forms to get the tree ID, node and URL of any problem reports. To save our customers some typing, and make it faster for us to answer questions, we’ve built our own Contact page using Zingtree. For technical and sales inquiries, the decision tree leads to an end point that opens Intercom chat, with information about the problem already pre-populated.

Once you submit a technical question, here’s what appears in Intercom:

As Zingtree is getting more and more larger companies as clients, we’ve received a lot of requests for being able to better manage a large library of trees. Some customers are planning on creating hundreds or even thousands of trees. Our latest update makes it even easier to locate and organize large decision tree “forests.”

First Step: Tag Your Trees!

If you haven’t done so already, you should tag your trees. A tag is like a category – any tree can have multiple tags. This is the first step to being better organized.

Locating Trees by Tag

Once you’ve tagged your trees, Zingtree has a few different ways to make it easy to stay organized:

For Authors: Filter your list of trees by tag in the My Trees tool.

For Authors: Use Tree Search to enter a list of tags to find trees that have any or all of the desired tags.

For Agents or End-Users: Authors can use new Macros to present a list of trees to an end-user that contain any or all tags in a list.

Authors: Filter by Tag in the My Trees Tool

When you use the My Trees tool, you’ll see an option at the top right for Has Tag. This contains a list of all the decision tree tags in use for your organization:

Select a tag, and you’ll see all the trees that have that tag.

Authors: Use Tree Search

For more powerful searching using tags, use the Search button in My Trees. You have four different search options. These two apply to tag matching:

Match Tree Tags (any): Enter a comma separated list of tags. The results return a list of trees that include any of the tags in the list.

Match Tree Tags (all):Enter a comma separated list of tags. The results return a list of trees that include all of the tags in the list.

Using Macros to Present Lists of Trees by Tag

Inside the content area of any tree, you can insert a special macro to show all the trees in your organization that match any or all tags in a list. You can examine the Tree Tag Demo in the Zingtree Gallery to see how this is done.

The two macros you can insert into the content area are:

##treetaglist-any: tags##

##treetaglist-all: tags##

In the examples above, replace tags with a comma separated list of tags. treetaglist-any will return a list of trees that match any of the tags in the list. treetaglist-all returns only those trees that contain all the tags in the list.

Examples:

#treetaglist-any: demo,gallery## – matches trees that are tagged with eitherdemo or gallery.

#treetaglist-all: demo,gallery## – matches trees that are tagged with both demo and gallery.

Shortcut: When editing a node, you can insert these macros from the Templates editing tool in the Content editor:

Bonus: Dynamic Lists

When publishing a tree, if you add a tags= parameter to the tree URL, you can dynamically import the list of tags used by the tree macros. Be sure to separate the tags with | characters. Example:

In the search results, click the Integration Link Template button at the bottom of the page. This will show you a URL to use as the basis for linking from your Help Desk/CRM system to the Zingtree search. You can add style parameters to this link from the Advanced Hosting Options page as well to ensure your trees appear with the desired look and feel.

Example:

This link is derived from a search in the Zingtree Gallery. The search, style and transition parameters are changed from the template example to customize the result.

Chances are, if you’re running or working for a startup, you’ve got less than no time to deal with a lot of things. No matter the industry you’re running in, you need a diverse, comprehensive toolkit to help you accomplish your goals, stay productive, and keep customers happy.

We’re a startup ourselves. We get how messy, brilliant, mind-numbing and rewarding every step of the way is, and have found some of the best apps and tools available today to help make things just a little smoother.

1. Zapier

Zapier is one of those digital wonders that’s still vastly-underrated, in our opinion. With the ability to automate actions across applications that you already use, it enables you to expand the potential of all of your resources. So far, Zapier has 500+ apps it can connect with, including Trello, Gmail, Mailchimp, WordPress, and Evernote.

2. Zendesk

Sometimes you need some help from companies that know exactly what they’re doing. Zendesk is a cloud-based, customer service software company that allows businesses of all sizes to develop super efficient, customer-centric CRM processes that — above all else — help you build and maintain great relationships with the people who are buying your product or service.

3. Intercom

Live chat interactions are one of our favorite ways to provide real-time, one-on-one support and service to customers. Intercomis on our all-star list of great live chat systems to implement online. Those with quick questions really appreciate the convenience and engagement with a real person, and businesses can provide fast assistance while staying productive.

4. Slack

Internal communication is just as important as the interactions with your customers; the rate of efficiency can either hurt or help your business. Slack exists to help startups like us keep in touch, collaborate, and stay organized as a whole team, even in those crunch-time moments. When in doubt, you can share reminders and other important notes to Slack as well; with powerful search features, it’s basically impossible to lose a text-based detail.

5. Zingtree (that’s us!)

Providing always-on support access might sound like a daunting task — any truly valuable automation can — but, the long-term benefits that businesses see from implementing these kinds of processes is astounding. Zingtree allows you to build customized, interactive decision trees online (and even embedded into your own website) that help customers help themselves, day or night.